Minnesota Wild in-game host Kirsten Krull recalled the final messages she exchanged with her podcast cohost, Jessi Pierce, less than 48 hours before Pierce and her three young children died in a house fire.
“There was a Wild home game that day and we were texting a little bit during the game. That was the last time I talked to her,” Krull told the Daily Mail on Thursday, March 26. “She told me she liked my hair, which feels dumb now.”
Pierce, 37, and her three children — sons Hudson, 8, and Cayden, 6, and daughter Avery, 4 — were all killed when their single-family home in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, caught on fire on Saturday, March 21. The fire also took the life of the family’s dog.
“I feel like the last few days have been a nightmare,” Krull said. “I lost not only somebody who I considered a big sister but her three little kids and her dog too. She always told me how protective her dog was of those kids, she said that her dog thought those were her babies.”
She added, “To lose all of that in an instant, it’s just tragic.”
Krull recounted hearing news about fire on Saturday morning, just hours after the Pierce home was engulfed.
“I was in my living room, I had just poured myself a cup of coffee,” she recalled. “I think it was, like, 10 a.m. and I was getting ready to work the Wild game because I had to be there in a few hours, it was a game day. I actually went on Instagram and I saw somebody had sent me a message asking if it was her. I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Krull continued, “I went to her profile because I was like, ‘She would have posted about it if something happened.’ And there was no post. I just kind of lost my breath.”
After doing a Google search, Krull “saw the picture of her house and I saw the headline.”
“I hadn’t got official confirmation but I knew,” she said.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation, but arson has been ruled out.
Krull also remembered Pierce’s three children, whom she shared with her husband, Mike Hinrichs. Hinrichs was out of town on business at the time of the fire.
“Hudson was incredibly smart,” Krull said. “Jessi and her husband, Mike, would always share that he was ahead of his grade, he was bored in classes because they weren’t hard enough for him. He was very, very smart. Cayden was really funny. I connected to him in a more personal way because he was the middle child. I’m the middle child of my own family so I felt like I got him.”
Krull called Pierce’s daughter Avery “assertive” and suggested she “was gonna be just like her mom.”
“They’re going to be deeply missed,” she said.
